City of Winchester receives $350K grant for stormwater improvement project

Governor Beshear has announced more than a million dollars in grants for “green infrastructure projects.” Among those is $350,000 for the City of Winchester’s Fifth Street Stream Restoration Project. Mike Flynn is a former city manager who’s assisting with the project.

“We’re going to be able to take out some of that piping and make this a more natural drainage area, widen the stream out in that area to be able to contain some of that water during some extreme events.”

Funds for the grants are from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed by President Biden in 2021. Flynn said their grant will pay more than two-thirds of the cost of the project, which is designed to reduce stormwater runoff from downtown Winchester north to Poynterville.

“It just depends on the severity and the intensity of the rain, and for how long, there's been times where we've had some severe flooding in this area.”

Flynn said the project will include restoring vegetation, with work likely to begin in the fall of ’25 and take three or four months to complete.

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